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by serf 297 days ago
there is more to it than that. it's about modularization as well.

I run LLMs against a 500k LoC poker engine and they do well because the engine is modularized into many small parts with a focus on good naming schemes and DRY.

If it doesn't require a lot of context for an LLM to figure out how to direct effort then the codebase size is irrelevant -- what becomes relevant in those scenarios is module size and the amount of modules implicated with any change or problem-solving. The LLM codebase 'navigation' becomes near-free with good naming and structure. If you code in a style that allows an LLM to navigate the codebase via just an `ls` output it can handle things deftly.

The LLMification of things has definitely made me embrace the concept of program-as-plugin-loader more-so than ever before.

2 comments

The app I work on is fairly highly modular, to the point that we split the app in half and unwinding the two halves of the code only took about 2 weeks.

> The LLM codebase 'navigation' becomes near-free with good naming and structure

I have not found this to be true. They seem to break badly if you have a lot of files with similar-ish names even if they're descriptive.

This has the side benefit of likely being easier to navigate for humans too. The less I need to keep in my head to figure something out the better.